Cycle Parking this way

Cycle Parking this way
Originally uploaded by smsm1

I noticed this sign at the Gyle Centre recently after they had move the cycle parking to another location. I wish there was more of these signs at supermarkets, as the bike parking is often hidden away so that you cannot find it. The same should apply to large offices, especially ones that don't like you chaining the bike to the railings at their front door, and instead you have to park your bike somewhere else that often isn't obvious.

Cycling: New chain and chain rings

I've finally got around to replacing my worn chain and chain rings/cogs on my bicycle. I have gone for 2 extra teeth on the front and one less on the back. This means I'll be getting a few extra turns of the wheel for each turn of the pedals. 

Before putting the new chain on, I compared the two, and the old one had stretched by nearly 2 links over the whole length. No wonder the teeth were wearing away so much, and making so much noise when pedalling. 

On my test ride this afternoon, I noticed it was running a lot smoother. Though it does appear that the hub requires to be pulled apart again to be fully re-greased, though I'm maybe thinking that it will need to be replaced due to the wear.

There are a couple of photos of the old cogs below. Take a look at how worn they are.

Happy New Year

This year I headed into the centre of Edinburgh with some friends from university for a house party. Also went out to see the fireworks from a pedestrian bridge over the West Approach Road. This was a great spot as you can see the castle from the west.

There is a video below of the fireworks.

iLife Browser in Leopard's open dialogs

In Leopard, if the developer allows certain types of file to be opened, then you get a free iLife browser in the file open dialog. This applies to OpenOffice.org aqua on Leopard too. As the X11 version of OpenOffice.org doesn't have a native filepicker, this won't be available there.

Find a screenshot below.

 

Those who have played with the latest OpenOffice.org aqua builds, you will find that you get an open dialog like the above one, without any way to select any files. This is a known bug. You simply cancel and open the dialog again to workaround the issue, until the fix is found and integrated.

BBC's iPlayer now compatible with Mac OS X

After reading a macnn article. I have now found out that the BBC's Player is now supported on Mac OS X. It is great that I can now watch BBC content from within Safari. The player only has a short buffer, though you can jump to any part of the video and it will start playing from there with very little delay. You have to remember that I have an internet connection of about 7Mbit downstream and around 0.8Mbit upstream. Therefore I don't know how people on slower connections will manage.

Some video items come up with:

"

with no explanation as to why. Maybe some videos are not updated to the adobe flash video type.

Now I'd like to get an improvement to Space, that will allow me to make a window in any application to be front most and move between space as required. That way when I'm playing a video the window will always show. Another problem that I have found with spaces is that when switching apps with command+tab or clicking the icon in the dock, a random window usually comes forward.

Edinburgh Leopard Tech Talk

Today I went along to the Leopard Tech Talk in Edinburgh at the posh Caledonian Hilton Hotel.

It was a very interesting event, and might just convince me to start programming in Cocoa and Objective-C 2.0. Objective-C 2.0 is far more like Java when it comes to memory management. This is where I tend to struggle in C. The event was under Apple Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), so I can't publicly discuss anything that isn't publicly available.

In the Cambridge Bar afterwards, one of the things that I tried to fix with the help of and Apple Tech guy was the Finder restarting when trying to change file permissions. This is mentioned in Apple support article 307128. However the instructions there don't quite work. After some tries in the pub I was still getting the crash. Once I got home I had some tried the article again, and the second sudo dscl command seemed to wipe out the group record. In the end I did manage to get the problem fix, and I no longer get the crash.

I also got to play with an iPhone, and the reception on the O2 network is crap. The iPhone was only just, maybe thinking about getting a signal. On the other hand my Sony Ericsson k750i on the Vodafone network could get a full signal. Since I upgraded to Leopard I haven't had my phone working as a bluetooth modem. With the help of the tutorial that I used the last time, and the GPRS network data table, I managed to get it working again.

The tutorial is now out of date of Leopard. On Leopard it is now a lot easier to setup. Once you have paired your phone, head into network preferences, and click Bluetooth in the left column. Then use the "User name" from the afore mentioned data table for the "Account Name" in Network preferences. The "Password" field uses the same name in both the data table and Network preferences. Next you need to click "Advanced...". Select the appropriate vendor and model for your phone, and enter the appropriate APN from the data table. Hit "OK", then "Apply" and you should be ready to connect.

At least now, the next time I go out with my laptop, and don't want to pay for expensive wifi, I can use a little bit of data on my pay as you go phone.

Mac OS X OpenOffice.org file naming scheme

Bruce has mentioned that he didn't understand the files on the good-day server in a comment to a prior blog post.

I'll try to make this as simple as possible for end users to understand using the following example:

OOo_SRC680_m237_MacOSXIntel_AQUA_install_en-US.dmg

This can be broken down into several smaller chunks _ is used as a separator:

OOo is the short product name. Other options are BrOo (the Brazilian localisation of OpenOffice.org due to

SRC680 is the code line, this changes with every major release. All release candidates are done on a different code line. For example OpenOffice.org 2.3.x used OOG680.

m237 is the milestone. OpenOffice.org code base has a new milestone every few weeks (sometimes a milestone will have only a few days between but this is rare). This number increases after several new code change have been integrated into the trunk of the code line. Internally within OpenOffice.org this is a MWS or Master WorkSpace.*

MacOSXIntel tells you the Operating System and the Platform that this build is for. Another option relevant to mac users is MacOSXPPC or MacOSXPowerPC. The name is changing/has changed to come in line with other platforms.

AQUA states that this is an AQUA build. The other option is X11. This option is only there during the transition from X11 to Aqua. It will be soon be the case that this parameter won't be included when Aqua is default.

install is there to say that this is an application and not a language pack, SDK or URE. The SDK and URE are generally only needed by developers. Language packs are currently not available for Mac OS X.

en-US this is the language that is to be installed.

* In OpenOffice.org we use a trunk and branch method. Think of a tree growing. Any new code is created in a branch (internally called a CWS), which is merged back into the trunk when it is ready. Think of the milestones being the rings you see when you cut a tree down. However we are producing these rings (milestones) far more frequently than a tree in nature.

Cycling: Edinburgh Critical Mass - St Andrews Day

On Friday I headed in to the centre of Edinburgh for November's Critical Mass. Even before I set off from work in the west of the city, it was pitch black. So I had my lights and reflective jacket on.

About 17:45 a whole load of fireworks started from Edinburgh Castle to mark St Andrews Day. We had a great view point from the foot of the mount between the two National Galleries. There was a couple of points where the fireworks went off in a cross pattern, a bit like the cross on the Saltire (our national flag).

About 50 of us participated in this month's ride. Map of the November Critical Mass ride.

Today I watched the River City omnibus. Friday's episode really emphasised the fact that in Scotland we really don't celebrate Saint Andrews Day. In fact we usually forget that Saint Andrews Day even exists. Over the other side of the pond, Tartan Day is celebrated (at a different time of year), far more than what we do. Are we Scots no use a celebrating? Or are we just too busy working to bother with celbrations?

OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X Leopard

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was launched by Apple Inc. about one month ago.

OpenOffice.org, with the exception of the Java features will work on Leopard. If you require the Java features of OpenOffice.org on Leopard, you require to use milestone m237 or later. 

The problem essentially boils down to the way that OpenOffice.org detects Java, and the fact that "Apple Computer Inc." is NOT the same as "Apple Inc.". (There are a few other build issues too.)

Thanks should go to Florian, Philip and Eric Bachard for their work on this issue.

The past 2 months

It has been a couple of months now since I've properly written a blog post. So here is a longish catchup post.

I have been busy doing agency work mostly in staff restaurants as a Kitchen Porter. I've even bumped into the Lead of the Marketing Project in our home town, rather than having to go to some OpenOffice.org conference. I did spend 3 weeks commuting by train (a novelty for me), to Stirling to work as a caretaker. Unfortunately the work is rather dull, though there are bills to be paid. Hopefully I'll get around to updating my CV and sending it off to relevant people to hopefully get a degree related job.

Now back to 2 months ago.

I managed to get up and do my Buildbot presentation at ooocon2007 without any breakfast. The presentation has been really useful, as I have received some very useful feedback from developers on what they want from the system.

Code writers are interested in seeing if their code breaks on some other platform as early as possible. They want this to be reliable, and ideally the same configuration as the officially released builds.

The QA project are looking for install sets for testing new code that is about to be introduced into the main code line. Again they ideally want to have the same configuration as the officially released builds.

At the moment the source code statistics aren't interesting enough for developers to want them. Also the basics don't currently work well enough.

My presentation in PDF My presentation in ODF

I have finally got around to Geotagging my photos from this years OpenOffice.org conference in the past few days. As I have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I found that my previous geotagging solution (GPSPhotoLinker) has stopped working as a library has stopped working due to a perl version mismatch. So I have headed to the command line with a perl script. gpsPhoto.pl seems to do the trick, though it is a pain to get the command line right as it isn't as easy to just drag a load of photos from iPhoto. I'm not upgrading to iLife 08, as there is no GPS tagging support. Leopard's Preview has a feature that allows you to go to a Google map of where the photo was taken. However, what I really want it to tell iPhoto: look in this folder for GPS traces, and geo tag all these photos automatically.

For future reference (as I was in mainland Europe with daylight saving the offset from UTC is minus 2 hours):

./gpsPhoto.pl --gpsdir 2007-09 --timeoffset -7200 --maxtimediff 7200 --overwrite-geotagged --dir /Users/shaunmcdonald/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/Originals/2007/ooocon2007/

Photos from ooocon2007. I've also added the photos to Flickr with the ooocon2007 tag.

As many people have already seen. I am now the lead for the Mac Port of the OpenOffice.org. Eric Bachard made the announcement some time ago. I have posted my vision to the Mac porting mailing list. Due to time constraints as mentioned at the start of this blog post, I won't be spending as much time as Eric Bachard on the project. I'm sure Eric will do a great job as the lead of the Education project, which tries to get more students involved in the OpenOffice.org project.

I am currently moving broadband provider from VirginMedia to Be*. For the same price I'm getting about 4 times the speed, with a slightly greater dropout for the same £18 per month.

When I was working out in Stirling I cycled home, or part of the way home. I have managed to map and tag most of the National Cycle Network route 76 from Stirling to Kincardine/Grangemouth. The south of the Kincardine Bridge is rather difficult to map and cycle just now as there is a lot of major road works and changes to the road network happening there.

About a fortnight ago I cycle 73 miles from Edinburgh to Ayr along the A70. I left quite late just before midday, and took about 6 hours. With the winter setting in, the last hour was pitch black. I lazily took the train back home for £8.80 with my Young Person Railcard. (Rather than cycling back home.) I have mapped and tagged the A70 with my GPS trace for the OpenStreetMap project. My ride on MapMyRide.com. I probably won't cycle the A71 to Kilmarnock as it is a more dangerous road.

I have created a count down dashboard widget to State of the Map 2008. Download the SOTM countdown widget. 

Finally, I have partnered with Manager-Pro. To translate and distribute and English version of their software. All exported reports require the usage of OpenOffice.org. Either as the document reader as the exported documents are in the OpenOffice.org 1 format. If a user wants the reports in PDF, Word or Excel formats, OpenOffice.org requires to be installed for the file format translators within OpenOffice.org.